AHHHHHHYEAAAAAAYYYYY YOU’RE GOING TO NERDWESTERN NORTHWESTERN NORTHWASTED !!!!!
Congratulations. Sincerely. You took 7 or 8 AP exams and scored somewhere 33+ on your ACT* You wrestled away your school’s student presidency from that fucking bitch Katie Taylor and you sacrificed a healthy sleep schedule for that batch of A pluses.
And now,
It’s all paid off.
In June, Sherman Ave sat down with each of the 2013 Homecoming Court nominees for wide-ranging discussions. If any cultural references seem slightly out of date, that’s because that was June and this is September and that’s how time works. Voting for Homecoming King and Queen begins soon!
Packingham: How do you spell your last name?
Demetri: E-L-I-A-S. Elias.
Packingham: Okay, and how do you spell your mother’s maiden name?
Demetri: Pravata. P-R-A-V-A-T-A.
Packingham: And what are you studying?
Demetri: Archaeology and history major and I have a classical studies minor.
Packingham: When did you discover your passion for classical studies?
Demetri: Well, I’ve always wanted to do history, ever since lower school, I’ve really just enjoyed history as a subject. But then I took a gap year and I traveled and I was doing community service for a year and it was awesome. I went all around, it was a super cool experience, I was like coaching soccer in Ghana, I was in Greece working with sea turtles living on the beach, I was outside a lot and doing a lot of hands-on work, and I realized I wanted some sort of job that I could be outside with, so that’s where archaeology came in the picture. Because I wanted to do something historical but be outside and hands-on. And then classics, a lot of distros come from the classics department.
The Sherman Ave Editors Ross Packingham and Sir Edward Twattingworth III sat down with Professor Gary Saul Morson for an interview. It was in Cosi. Everyone had fun.
He doesn’t care, he loves it.
Twattingworth: Where are you from?
Morson: New York.
Twattingworth: Oh. I think it was Pushkin who called New York the “concrete jungle where dreams are made of.”
Morson: Oh come on.
Twattingworth: Is that an accurate description of your hometown?
Morson: Pushkin never said any such thing.
Packingham: It was either Pushkin or Jay-Z. I understand you went to Yale?
Morson: I did.
Packingham: Is it weird being an alumnus of an institution that most of your students wanted to attend but weren’t smart enough? Continue reading
What I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.
Dear Asshats,
As you’re no doubt aware, and we know you’re no doubt aware because you’ve been counting down every frickin’ minute since last June, Northwestern’s Mayfest is at the end of this week. Dildo day or whatever the eff. Haha Dildo. See what I did there? Said a dirty word. High five, Carl.
Now I know that you think this is the one day of the year where there’s an understanding between us and… you people… regarding the consumption of the devil’s water and the shouting of the word ‘blowjob.’ Like somehow we’ll be ok with you crossing Sheridan Road into out territory.
We’ve killed people for less.
I don’t give a flying fuck if you go to PTI about me. I WILL FUCKING ASSAULT YOU.
If you just opened this like I told you to, tie yourself down to whatever chair you’re sitting in, because this email is going to be a rougher fucking ride than your last lonely Friday with your fucksaw.
For those of you that have your heads stuck under the Rock, which apparently is the majority of this organization, we have been FUCKING UP in terms of tour guide stories and general social interactions with prospies. I’ve been getting emails on emails about tour guides LITERALLY being so fucking AWKWARD and so fucking BORING. If you’re reading this right now and saying to yourself, “Oh em gee Morty, I’ve been having so much fun telling all my tours about the fabulous faculty on campus during Wildcat days!”, then punch yourself in the face right now so that I don’t have to fucking find you on campus to do it myself.
Few artists have shaken the Northwestern community quite like Chet Haze. So what better artist to emulate for the release of Evander Jones’ first single than Chester Hanks himself? Jones’ cover will also be featured on our upcoming mixtape of local musicians, Now That’s What I Call Heinous, vol. 1, set for release this Winter, and can be purchased wherever print editions of Sherman Ave are sold.
This might be one of the few songs in recorded history featuring a worse rapper than Chet Haze himself.
We would like to cordially invite Greenland to suck the fattest dick on the planet.
This is a map of Sherman Ave’s global reach. The countries that are filled in with color have viewed Sherman Ave at least once (obviously, it is the country as a whole viewing it together as part of a ceremony, and not one single person arbitrarily browsing the Internet for fucksaw videos). The color-coding isn’t especially relevant to viewership; it represents the general greatness of the country, judged on the traditional scale of 1 to 32,524.
As part of a marketing effort, we’re making attempts to analyze these global trends of viewership to figure out how we can broaden our appeal, and in all our gratitude and kindness, we’ve decided to show our strategies to you, our dickholders shareholders (remember the other night, when you had one too many and bought $50,000 worth of stock in a blog that doesn’t yet run its own advertisements?).
Let’s start with North America. We’re clearly getting a considerable amount of views from Canada, United States, and Mexico. This is probably due largely to a few shady deals we made in the 1990s when NAFTA was being drafted, shortly after Al Gore invented the Internet.
Even in Central America, some of the rural fruit farmers have found their way onto our joyous blog.* Yes, it may have something to do with the fact that we’ve been actively trading arms to the Sandinistas over the last few years to cover Sherman Ave’s fixed production costs (Miller High Life and Flaming Hot Cheetos), but we also like to think that we’ve managed to score some views in Costa Rica by casually ranting about how much we hate their country.
One of our Brazilian readers, vicariously feeling our sadness at the revocation of The Keg's liquor license
In South America, you may notice that all countries have some level of viewership of Sherman Ave. I know, you might be thinking, “What about French Guiana, Suriname, and Guyana?” In response: Those piece-of-shit countries are not real countries. French Guiana is a territory of France (If the UN Security Council was the Jackson 5, France would be Tito), Suriname’s primary language is Dutch (apparently Dutch is a language?), and Guyana is known best for mass suicide. Although we didn’t get a high quantity of views from countries like Argentina and Brazil, we feel safe in assuming that the views we did came from hot Brazilian models, the Argentinian soccer team, and the corpse of Eva Peron.
Moving onto Europe, you’ll see that we have almost absolute viewership in Europe. This is quite a shocking insight for us; we didn’t realize our writing style crafted such a strong appeal to metrosexual chain-smokers who do nothing but listen to house music and get bailed out by the United States in world wars. Strangely, though, it does seem that there is a small void in Moldova, where the few Internet users are presumably brainstorming ways to make their country relevant and/or dying in abject poverty.
Asia provides arguably the most surprising statistics. Judging from the fact that a) we’ve had no viewers in Yemen or Oman, and b) we’ve gone 1 for 7 with countries ending in “-stan,” our sweeping campaign to appeal to Muslim Internet users has failed unequivocally. We hope to remedy this by expanding our content to be more culturally friendly; in the future, expect continuations of current article series, such as “Point/Counterpoint: Qu’ran vs. Koran,” “Freshman Guide: Finding A Mosque in Evanston,” and “An Open Letter Non-apology to American Automobile Owners.”
Our efforts in Africa, on the other hand, appear to have been successful beyond our wildest dreams. As you can see, we’ve gotten views from every Internet user on the continent.**
No luck with Papua New Guinea, though. We’re discussing the launch of a subsidiary blog called “Pygmy Ave.”
*“Rural Fruit Farmer” is incidentally the name of Clay Aiken’s next album.
**We’re assuming the penguins from the movie “Madagascar” haven’t yet figured out how to use the Internet.
Professors. Sometimes you love them, sometimes you hate them, and sometimes you’re absolutely horrified by their lack of judgment in allowing a woman to be fucksawed in an after-class demonstration. But regardless of how we feel about our professors, the inevitable truth is that we spend an average of 15-20 hours a week listening to them speak (except for Comm majors, who rarely scratch the double-digits). With all this time we spend with these educational overlords, we begin to pick up on their habits pretty quickly. These are the five things that, judging from experience, are crucial characteristics of anyone aspiring to be a college professor.
To operate Powerpoint, you must first find the Holy Grail.
5. A Complete Inability to Use Basic Technology
It’s quite astounding that someone can be intelligent and driven enough to be a leader in their field of study, but never learn how to operate a fucking projector. If one were to tally up every minute of lecture lost because a professor was trying to figure out how to play a 30-second video clip, it very well might eclipse the number of minutes spent trying desperately to set a high score on Tetris during lecture. The funniest part is when the professor, frantically trying to remedy the situation, starts mindlessly changing settings on his/her computer, which – more often that not – already has Mandarin as the default language.
4. An Irreconcilable Misunderstanding of Appropriate E-mail Length
Picture this: It’s a warm, sunny Friday afternoon. You’ve just gone for a lengthy walk around campus, or perhaps you’ve already started day-drinking in preparation for a Disney Channel Original Movie Marathon. You quickly check your e-mail before dinner, when suddenly – BAM! It’s a 3,000-word juggernaut from a professor, providing your 200-person lecture with a detailed explanation of necessary background information for the next week’s readings. This distasteful offense is especially common among professors of history or political science classes. Instead of listing a very simply who-what-where-when-why-how, professors generally prefer to word-vomit an incoherent score of paragraphs explaining every detail of 11th century Indian Ocean trade that you could ever imagine.
Smiling sadistically as you attempt to pronounce his last name
3. Being Indian
This is fairly self-explanatory.
2. A Devastating Lack of Visual Coherence
I’ll be honest – I am by no means a fashionista. In fact, I’d go so far to say I rarely give fucks about whether or not what I’m wearing would give a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy cast member a deadly heart attack. But sometimes professors take it too far. For example, consider something I call the “4-inch buffer” – the area within 4 inches above and below the belt buckle, where a male professor’s tie never manages to reside. Typically, it’s either scraping their knees or hovering at their ribcage.
Style unawareness can also be incredibly adorable.
There are several other notable styles of a professor’s failure to comply with basic fashion norms; the “shirt-so-wrinkled-that-you-can’t-actually-comprehend-how-many-times-they’ve-worn-it”, the “pants-they’ve-worn-seven-lectures-in-a-row,” and the “sweater vest” are among the most common infractions.
1. A Tendency to Namedrop at Every Possible Opportunity
Here’s a peculiar difference between college students and professors. College students like to ascribe a specific title to each relationship; instead of merely saying “she’s my friend,” we prefer to say “she’s my PoliSci 385 Study Buddy!” or “she was Halloween hook-up #4!” or “she’s my pledge wife!” Professors, on the other hand, have one word for everyone they know: Colleague (henceforth referred to as the C-bomb). Professors throw around the C-bomb when it makes them appear to have more authority. Phrases like “my [C-bomb] in the U.N.” and “my [C-bomb] in the Senate” are thus very common phrases used by professors, when in reality, it would probably be more suitable for them to simply refer to them as “an expert in the field who I kind of met once and who sadly declined the offer to sign my breasts.”
Sherman Ave 